Surgery Performed With Google Cardboard Saved a Baby's Life

A 4-month-old girl is alive today thanks to a dramatic seven-hour surgery performed with Google Cardboard — those inexpensive handheld viewers that allow you to see 3D images on your iPhone.

Teegan Lexcen was born with only one lung and half a heart, according to CBS Miami. Doctors told her family there was nothing they could do to help her health, and sent her home with her twin sister Riley so she could spend her short life with her family in Minnesota.

"It was devastating," her mom Cassidy Lexcen told WSVN News. "Any parent that has to go through that is... it's devastating, and we lived every day by every day, knowing this could be her last day with us."

But after a couple of months, they found hope with the doctors at Miami's Nicklaus Children's Hospital, who thought Google cardboard's virtual imaging could help with surgery on Teegan's heart.

"He uploaded the images of the baby's heart that he got on the CT scan [to a smartphone], and you put it into this cardboard box, and then in his office, I was looking at the baby's heart in a way that I had never been able to do before," said Nicklaus Children's Hospital Dr. Redmond Burke. "With the box, you get a stereoscopic image, and you can move around in the environment to see every part of the heart."

The new view helped the doctors perform the successful seven-hour, open-heart surgery, and now Baby Teegan is recovering in the hospital's ICU. Burke told WSVN: "She's got a good shot."

"It's the best thing that we could have been given this time of year," Lexcen said. "We have another chance with our baby girl, and we didn't think we would ever have that."